Inasmuch as the ceaselessly-singing cicadas and their fate have sustained some interest here, it seems to me worth taking note of Plato's myth of the cicadas as set forth in his dialogue, Phaedrus, 258e-259d. I won't cite the text here -- it's accessible at the Perseus site, and it's one of the readings in the later sections of Reading Greek. Plato's myth has evoked some interesting discussion, e.g., Plato, Love, and Waxing Poetically Nostalgic about Cicadas, (http://lorianneparker-danley.com/plato- ... t-cicadas/) and Listening to the Cicadas; A Study of Plato’s Phaedrus, http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/ca ... 034334.pdf

The translator (Fowler, on Perseus) has them worshipping these Muses, but it looks like they are actually esteeming the arts of these Muses - τιμῶντας τὴν ἐκείνων μουσικὴν - rather than the Muses themselves. Am I missing something? Andrew

The translator (Fowler, on Perseus) has them worshipping these Muses, but it looks like they are actually esteeming the arts of these Muses - τιμῶντας τὴν ἐκείνων μουσικὴν - rather than the Muses themselves. Am I missing something? Andrew

I guess "worship" is appropriate if that means "doing attentive service to". The phrase in question is as you cite it, or more fully,

τοὺς ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ διάγοντάς τε καὶ τιμῶντας τὴν ἐκείνων μουσικὴν

"esteeming their music" is parallel to "passing their lives in philosophy." I suppose you might say that this amounts to "worshipping" these goddesses. I'm reminded of a passage in the Phaedo where Socrates, on the morning that he is to drink the hemlock, tells of the dreams he has had with a recurrent voice urging him to "make music." He said that throughout his life he'd had this dream and had always assumed that it meant that he must live the kind of life that he was living -- the life of philosophic discourse -- that living such a life was "making music" -- but that now he was beginning to wonder whether the admonition might not be meant literally; as a consequence, he said he'd been puttering about with an effort to turn some of Aesop's fables into verse ...